From Events to Enterprise: Meeting Package’s Journey to Finding Product-Market Fit in Hotel Tech

Product-market fit rarely comes from your first idea. Sometimes, it takes running a business in your target market to truly understand what it needs. For Meeting Package, the path to product-market fit started with running an events agency.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, CEO Joonas Ahola shared how direct experience with industry pain points shaped their evolution from services to software. Here’s how that journey unfolded:

The Events Agency Phase

At 16, Joonas was already learning the events business firsthand. “We were doing events from different kinds, from birthday parties to weddings to corporate events, and grew that more or less nationwide in 20, 1314,” he explains.

But success revealed fundamental problems with the business model. “If you are in a seasonal business in Finland, it’s super risky to hire full time employees for a business that is super sensitive to seasonalities,” Joonas notes. The agency also faced limited revenue streams: “We only had, like, event spaces and catering, which meant the fact that we didn’t have additional revenue streams other than events.”

The Marketplace Attempt

This firsthand experience with industry pain points led to their first software attempt: a marketplace for meeting venues. “We thought that we can fix the whole issue in the industry by being a marketplace kind of copying the Airbnb model in the meetings and events landscape,” Joonas recalls.

The marketplace launched in 2016, but a fundamental problem emerged: “Hotels and venues already are professionals and they already have technology that run their operations.” Unlike Airbnb hosts managing personal properties, hotels had sophisticated systems that wouldn’t integrate with a simple marketplace.

The Enterprise Pivot

By 2018, it was clear the marketplace model wouldn’t work. “If you just have an extranet marketplace, it will never fly because it’s not connected to the live inventory,” Joonas explains. This realization led to a crucial pivot: instead of replacing hotel systems, they would enhance them.

The new focus became “streamlining and automating the operations for meetings and events and group booking business, which is roughly 20% to 30% of hotels revenue in general.” This meant building integrations with existing hotel systems – a complex technical and political challenge.

Finding True Product-Market Fit

The pivot to enterprise software required more than just technical changes. It meant building a different type of team: “We acknowledge the fact that we need to have people who can challenge the hotels because we’re not creating a vertical, we’re changing the way they operate.”

It also meant being more selective about customers. They focused on “enterprise SME’s that are more on the full service model” and eliminated “your mom and pop hotel, or your hotel is in the middle of nowhere.”

The results validated this approach. From marketplace-era conversion rates below 10%, they now see “60% to 70% on average.” Even COVID-19, which devastated the hospitality industry, ultimately strengthened their position by giving them time to perfect their product.

Looking Ahead

Today, Meeting Package aims to have “50,000 instantly bookable venues globally” by 2027. But perhaps more importantly, they want to be “the biggest owner of inventory going global” – a vision that emerged from truly understanding the industry’s needs.

For founders, Meeting Package’s journey offers a crucial lesson: sometimes the fastest path to product-market fit is the indirect one. Their experience running an events agency gave them insights no market research could provide. And their failed marketplace attempt taught them exactly why existing solutions weren’t working.

The key was being willing to learn from these experiences – and having the courage to pivot when those lessons pointed in a new direction.